| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Linda Young. Middle-Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century: America, Australia and Britain. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2003. Pp. xi, 245. $65.00.
The alphabetically ordered subtitle of this book hints where it is going interpretatively as well as geographically. A diffusionist would list Britain first, then transatlantic America, and finally antipodean Australia. But Linda Young's timely book aims to show that the creation of a middle class was a global phenomenon in the nineteenth century—globally Anglo, at least. Its intelligent introduction argues for a transnational understanding of middle-class formations, while forsaking a Marxist explanation for a cultural interpretation. That culture was "gentility" (p. 15).	1
Gentility, Young argues, was "the entire cultural system of the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century middle class, the ideology that characterized, identified and solidified it" (p. 15). Her theoretical perspective derives from E. P. Thompson's concept of class as a mutual identification of interests on the basis of behavior and from Pierre Bourdieu's notion of groups creating social capital by systematically differentiating themselves from others. She links her historical explanation with Richard Bushman's The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (1992), Stuart Blumin's The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (1989), Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall's Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (1987), and Mary Ryan's Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (1981). She found that similarities among American, Australian, and British expressions of genteel culture were much stronger than their differences, even though the social and economic structures in each country had markedly different elements: nobility in Britain, slavery in America, and convict ancestry in Australia.	. . .

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